Carry on Camping
It’s August and high season for holidays. Indeed, a colleague is off soon for a week of wetly squelching around the Lake District, reading his weatherproofed Wainright and finding out that his £700 hand-held GPS ‘where the hell am I?’ detector does not work in drizzle.
He is camping.
Camping, I am told, is the new staying in. Staying in, apparently, used to be the new going out and going out has always been the new way to obtain a better class of hangover and sexually transmitted disease. The only sort of hangover you get camping is if you don’t drop enough water purification tablets in the home made elderflower wine you got from the farm down the road and the only disease you’re likely to catch is foot and mouth.I have tremendous respect for campers.
In my youth a tent weighed around as much as a small pony was made of the sort of canvas that lines the gussets of the underwear of fat girls and had no doubt been bought second hand from a scout troop being disbanded after their pack leader got knocked up as a result of the great woggle-on-the-cock scandal of ’72. To this you added pots, pans, salve, gas, cookers, lights, lamps, first aid kit and many layers of wool and oiled cotton.
Now you pop into Tesco and pick up the sort of kit you could assault Everest with for a tenner, and it all fits in your back pocket.
As for GPS, don’t get me started. I’m not saying it’s a shame when a party of schoolkids dies of exposure because none of them can read a compass and the weather closes in and blah blah blah but think…do you really want that sort of person to possibly one day be in position of responsibility, possibly involving landing aircraft?
Three weeks of holidaying in the Peak District, where you can only tell it’s daytime because the rain warms up a bit, where the locals speak fluent grunt and where they think ‘integration’ is what you do to keep heat from escaping your house would either see any would-be Brit citizen sprinting for the coach station and a one-way ticket home, These are my kind of people.
He is camping.
Camping, I am told, is the new staying in. Staying in, apparently, used to be the new going out and going out has always been the new way to obtain a better class of hangover and sexually transmitted disease. The only sort of hangover you get camping is if you don’t drop enough water purification tablets in the home made elderflower wine you got from the farm down the road and the only disease you’re likely to catch is foot and mouth.I have tremendous respect for campers.
In my youth a tent weighed around as much as a small pony was made of the sort of canvas that lines the gussets of the underwear of fat girls and had no doubt been bought second hand from a scout troop being disbanded after their pack leader got knocked up as a result of the great woggle-on-the-cock scandal of ’72. To this you added pots, pans, salve, gas, cookers, lights, lamps, first aid kit and many layers of wool and oiled cotton.
Now you pop into Tesco and pick up the sort of kit you could assault Everest with for a tenner, and it all fits in your back pocket.
As for GPS, don’t get me started. I’m not saying it’s a shame when a party of schoolkids dies of exposure because none of them can read a compass and the weather closes in and blah blah blah but think…do you really want that sort of person to possibly one day be in position of responsibility, possibly involving landing aircraft?
Three weeks of holidaying in the Peak District, where you can only tell it’s daytime because the rain warms up a bit, where the locals speak fluent grunt and where they think ‘integration’ is what you do to keep heat from escaping your house would either see any would-be Brit citizen sprinting for the coach station and a one-way ticket home, These are my kind of people.
posted by Viv at 9:57 PM
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